Deja Vu

Denzel Washington does a lot with a little, as an ATF agent investigating a terrorist bombing in New Orleans. Throw in Val Kilmer, a secret government project using satellites to spy into the past, and it's actually pretty damn good.

By Luke Y. Thompson Nov 22, 2006 1:12 AMTags

Having exhausted virtually every action movie cliché known to man, Tony Scott has finally figured out that he didn't make a time travel movie yet. So here it is, with Denzel Washington in the lead, and it's actually pretty damn good.

Washington, doing a lot with very little, plays an ATF agent investigating a terrorist bombing in New Orleans. He's got skills like Sherlock Holmes, able to wipe his thumb on a corpse, lick it and determine by taste that a diesel bomb was involved (the training process for such a palate must have been interesting).

One such corpse, a beautiful dead woman (Idlewild's Paula Patton) seems to have been killed before the blast, by the same man...and as luck would have it, crazy ol' Val Kilmer just happens to be nearby, head of a secret government project that can use satellite cams to spy on anything, within a target radius, exactly four days in the past.

They'd try sending a human back, but it's just too risky...gee, wonder where this is going? Think Timecop with better acting and directing. It's hard to fault it for potentially breaking its own rules on time travel, when the whole point is for Denzel to see if he can.